If you're wondering if I'll ever tire of using this image,then you don't know me very well.

You guys, I've been harvesting beans from my bean plants for the last few days, blanching them in small batches and bagging them until I had enough to make a couple of servings for me and PDaughter.

Today was the day.

I guess for people who are perennial gardeners and are used to growing their own food, the act of eating something you've raised from a tiny nub is pretty non-dramatic. I mean, seed + water + sun + time = food. No biggie, right?

It's not rocket surgery. Or witchcraft. Nope, not at all.

But I've never grown my own food in my life. And while I'm a decent cook, I rely very strongly on my ingredients to be, you know, tasty, in the way that I expect them to taste. I trust, for example, that when I buy green beans at the store, they've been well raised and harvested at the right time and processed so that they'll be fresh and appropriately bean-flavored when I cook them at home.

Except this time, I raised the beans. And for all I knew, I could have done everything wrong and ended up with some horrible organism that looked like a green bean but tasted like ass and carried typhoid.

Honestly, this did not seem an unlikely outcome when I decided it was time to actually eat the little green bastards over which I'd fretted and toiled since May. I mean, right off the bat, it took me five months to grow two servings of a food that supposedly has a growing cycle of 45 days. I guess the Texas heat had something to do with it, but also it seemed perfectly plausible that I had spawned some kind of death-legume riddled with disease...or at least, not tasty.

PDaughter and I had already agreed that just having beans to harvest counted as a tremendous success, and if they turned out to be inedible it wasn't the end of the world. We would simply scrape them into the garbage disposal and never speak of them again. I didn't mention the part where I would cry into my pillow for a week. I'm the mom, I have to be strong like that.

Fuck off, failure-beans.

I decided to cook them simply: with garlic, butter, salt, pepper, and some slivered almonds. I boiled them for a minutes, then speared one on a fork to taste it.It was perfection.

One perfect bean.

It was sweet, and tender, and flavorful, and delicious.

My beans were awesome. PDaughter thought so, too.

And when there were a few left over, I saved them for Drummer Boy to try later in the afternoon. I think he liked them, too. He said he did.

But the main thing is, I loved them. I was so proud of my beanie-babies. So proud that I gobbled them up.

Which is totally an appropriate way to show love to a bean. Really.

Anyway, there are still new beans coming up on my plants. I'll keep harvesting and blanching until I have another meal's worth.

4 comments:

You also eat Thai peppers. Maybe they're mild Thai peppers but even the mildest of peppers from former Siam will still cause some people to suck the foam out of a fire extinguisher like whipped cream. Not me, but every Thai restaurant I've ever been in has had at least four degrees of hotness: mild, medium, hot, and native Thai. I hear you roar.

I attempt veggies every year, and I think I have decided that they are more trouble than they are worth. All that effort for 3 tomatoes or a scrawny eggplant. Now, herbs and salads I can do. Basil like crazy. But I confess, I have never tried beans....